Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him, Signed
[Signed by Marie Rudisill] Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him. First Edition. 1983. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed, “To Milton Mensch, a good friend, Marie Rudisill, Jim Rudisill." Co-written by Southern Renaissance scholar James C. Simmons.
A picture is sometimes worth more than a thousand words. Sometimes it predicts future. Consider the Benjamin Button photograph of an impish Truman Capote on the cover of this book. With that radiant mop of blond hair, the Little Lord Fauntleroy attire, and an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, Truman appears equal parts angel and demon, the very embodiment of the enfant terrible “La Côte Basque, 1965” revealed him to be. The author of this book, Marie “Tiny” Faulk Rudisill, was the younger sister of Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae. They were orphaned at an early age and taken in by their distant cousins, the same ones who would go on to raise Truman in Lillie Mae’s absence. Marie was barely a teenager when Truman came along. She served as his quasi-older sister and babysitter. She was also the keeper of the narcissistic Lillie Mae’s secrets. In this memoir, she describes a Southern Gothic upbringing very much in keeping with Capote’s early fiction. At times, one wonders whether fact is borrowing from fiction or vice versa, and it’s probably both. Many passages don’t align with other sources, but the gist is correct. Young Truman, though spoiled by the Faulks, nevertheless lacked the love of his mother—a contradiction that explains so much. Truman was displeased when this book came out. It did, however, inspire a note from his erstwhile friend Slim Keith, ending years of silence. “So amusing to read of your pathetic antecedents & childhood,” wrote Slim.
“Lillie Mae could be cruel, puncturing someone else’s happiness with a sharp remark, smiling as she said it. She could be kind and reassuring one moment and then humiliate you in the next…. No one I ever met could twist happiness into pain as quickly as Lillie Mae.”
--Marie Rudisill